Publication bias may boost findings for bilingual brain benefits

This is Scientific American's 60-second Mind. I am Karen Hopkin. Got a minute?

Over the past 10 years, many scientific papers have shown that speaking more than one language can convey some cognitive rewards. For example, bilingualism seems to boost the brain's ability to focus, plan and perform certain mentally taxing tasks, but a few papers show no such advantages. 

Now a study finds that research that challenges a bilingual benefit is less likely to be published than the studies that find one. This party pooping nor  ,or fiesta foiling, finding is in the journal Psychological Science. 

Researchers compared studies presented in at conferences to those actually accepted for publication. Of the 104 meeting abstracts that they examined, about half supported bilingual advantages a bilingual advantage, and half challenged or failed to find one. But when it came to publication, 63% of the bilingual boosting studies made it into a scientific journal, as opposed to 36% of the studies with no null findings.

That they did not The data do not address whether the bias towards the affirmative results comes to the journal editors and reviewers, or from the scientists themselves, and they don't suggest that bilingualism offers no advantages, r .Regardless of brain function, there exist undeniable social benefits to having two tongues versus just one.

Thanks for the minute. For Scientific American's 60-second Mind. I am Karen Hopkin.